Do degrading TV portrayals of women cause gender harassment?

December 16, 2013

A new study in Psychology of Women Quarterly considers whether objectifying women in television and harassment are causally linked. Researchers Silvia Galdi, Anne Maass, and Mara Cadinu designed two experimental studies that used video materials of actual TV shows to investigate the causal relationship between TV exposure and harassing conduct.

Together, the findings suggest degrading TV portrayals of women play a causal role in both gender harassment and sexual-coercion intentions and this relationship with gender harassment is at least in part attributable to a shift in masculinity norms. Therefore objectifying TV productions seem to create a normative context conducive to gender harassment, attesting to the responsibility of the mass media in promoting a climate that is hostile toward women.

"These conceptions go beyond harassment by men but involve society at large, including responsibilities of women and men to promote a different set of values," the researchers stated. "On a positive note then, the same TV programs can also promote a change in social and cultural norms, including those related to masculinity, which suggests that they can be used as means to reduce sexual harassment behavior and more generally to promote respect for women and men."

More information:
Find out more by reading the full article, titled "Objectifying Media: Their Effect on Gender Role Norms and Sexual Harassment of Women" in Psychology of Women Quarterly.

Related Stories

Men who experience high levels of sexual harassment are much more likely than women to induce vomiting and take laxatives and diuretics in an attempt to control their weight, according to a surprising finding by Michigan ...

Recommended for you

Babies learn language best by interacting with people rather than passively through a video or audio recording. But it's been unclear what aspects of social interactions make them so important for learning.

One of the big questions intelligence researchers grapple with is just how differences in intelligence are reflected in the human brain. Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in studying further details relating to suspected ...

(Medical Xpress)—Dichromacy is a color vision defect in which one of the three types of cone photoreceptors is missing. The condition is hereditary and sex-linked, mostly affecting males. Although researchers have explored ...

New research reveals that the more people think they know about a topic in general, the more likely they are to allege knowledge of completely made-up information and false facts, a phenomenon known as "overclaiming." The ...

For those who believe that birth order influences traits like personality and intelligence, a study of 377,000 high school students offers some good news: Yes, the study found, first-borns do have higher IQs and consistently ...

2 comments

I think they have a point. It is also obvious that the media is subliminally attempting to portray whites as being dumber than blacks and attempting to depict white women as being very attracted to black men. In short the decay of American values due to having a liberal black president.

"I think they have a point. It is also obvious that the media is subliminally attempting to portray whites as being dumber than blacks and attempting to depict white women as being very attracted to black men. In short the decay of American values due to having a liberal black president."

WOW....soon they will be finishing their gas chambers and crematory ovens to put us all. It would be "interesting" to see a world where only whites live. Wonder if they will exterminate each other until nobody is left. They might have new exclusionary policies against the short ones, then against the skinny ones, then against the ones with freckles, until the last pair of blue eyes stands alone.

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.